Just scant days before the Crysis demo's planned release on September 25
(story),
EA and Crytek announce that October 26 is the new release date for the
single-player demo for Crytek's upcoming first-person shooter. Here's word on the delay from Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli,
who explains they didn't want to jeopardize the timely release of the full game
on November 16 with their efforts at getting the demo out the door, but that the
demo will include the game editor as a consolation prize:

Hi everyone,

We have some news to announce.

First, I am sorry for the bad news - the Crysis single player demo will now be
available everywhere on October 26th, 2007.

We are taking some extra time to make sure you that you have an amazing
experience but also we did not want to risk the release date of Crysis at this
stage. To get the game into your hands by November the 16th, we had to make this
call.

Now the good news - the big surprise. The SP demo will be released with our
CryEngine 2 - Sandbox 2 game editor, giving the community the opportunity to get
familiar with the vast amount of tools they will have at their disposal four
weeks before we ship, something we have always wanted to do.

This is an exciting time for us at the studio as the development of Crysis comes
to an end and we are only a few weeks from Gold Master. We appreciate your
patience and are looking forward to getting Crysis into your hands on November
16th.

While a delay of a month isn't that bad they could of given us a bit more warning. It's not like they decided yesterday that the demo wasn't going to work, they have known for a while.

Indeed. I had a similar thing with Vista drivers for my audio card... they promised beta drivers months in advance and then a day or so before the expected release they announced that they'd be several months off. At least with Unreal Tournament 3 they have given us a hint that the game may blow over to next year - it's bad news but at least it's not a week before launch.

I think Crytek needs to hire some more / better PR people. They've had numerous blunders, like the DX9/10 server debate about day-to-night cycles, the Fileplanet beta release, etc. The issues aren't really that big but people make a fuss and it can get out of control.